Scholarship suggesting the existence of the Essenes, a religious Jewish group that lived in the Judea before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, is wrong, according to Prof. Rachel Elior, whose study on the subject will be released soon.

Elior blasts the predominant opinion of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars that the Essenes had written the scrolls in Qumran, claiming instead that they were written by ousted Temple priests in Jerusalem.

"Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls. But they didn't exist, they were invented by [Jewish-Roman historian] Josephus. It's a history of errors which is simply nonsense," she said.

In his book "The Jewish War," Flavius Josephus describes the Essenes as an ascetic, mystical religious sect that lived in abstinence from worldly pleasures, including sex.

The Essenes are commonly believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in a Qumran cave in 1947 and are considered the most significant archaeological discovery of the past century.

Hmmm..., that’s really odd, because over in Israel, they’re doing archeological digs in an area that was isolated and had a thriving community and they’ve traced the Dead Sea Scrolls (the material) which were found in caves — to the buried bones of the animals that the skins came from (from DNA testing).

So, they’ve linked up the Dead Sea Scrolls, to a specific place that they are doing archeological digs and it shows that it was an isolated but a thriving community.

What this guy is saying just doesn’t make any sense at all, especially when the very material was traced to the bones buried at this site where there was a thriving community...

"Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls. But they didn't exist, they were invented by [Jewish-Roman historian] Josephus. It's a history of errors which is simply nonsense," she said.

Yep, that Josephus was a real prankster.

I understand he worked part time as a Stand Up Comic too. His stage name was Jerryphus Seinfeldus

16
posted on 03/14/2009 5:51:48 AM PDT
by Condor51
(The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits)

Carbon-14 dating of milligram samples taken from ragged edges of manuscript margins determined the ages of the scrolls to range from the third century B.C.E. (Before Common Era) to 68 C.E., nearly 2,000 years ago. These dates support earlier paleographic research, which estimated the ages of the scrolls by analyzing the handwriting styles, materials, and formatting of the manuscripts.

"A commentary on the first two chapters of the biblical Book of Habakkuk was one of the 18 texts dated at the UA lab. 'The fact that this particular scroll (the Habakkuk commentary) dates to before the Christian era tends to eliminate the possibility that a follower of Christ could have written it,' Jull said yesterday. There is a 95 percent probability that the parchment from the Habakkuk commentary dates to between 150 B.C. and 5 B.C., Jull said. 'Some of the papyrus samples bear exact written dates within the text itself. These dates match those determined by the carbon-14 measurements,' the Israel Antiquities Authority stated in a news release. 'The reliability of paleography as a dating method is thus confirmed.'"

Reports have described the discovery, by a team led by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, of an "escape hatch" or "drainage tunnel" under the main street of ancient Jerusalem... two weeks earlier, archaeologists discovered the tunnel while searching for the city's main road. Shukron is quoted as saying that workmen engaged in the search "happened upon a small drainage channel that led to the discovery of the massive tunnel." The same report states that "the walls of the tunnel ... reach a height of 10 feet in some places," and a photograph of the site would appear to confirm that... According to the large group of stories based on the AP report, "Archaeologists think the tunnel leads to the Kidron River, which empties into the Dead Sea." The Nahal (or Wadi) Qidron does indeed lead eastward to the sea, but about halfway toward that body of water it bifurcates, the one main branch, under the same name, continuing east-southeast to the sea -- while the other bends slightly northward and, bearing the name of Nahal (or Wadi) Qumran, leads to Khirbet Qumran and was the main source feeding the large water-reservoirs that distinguish this site. The report of the Israel Antiquities Authority, focusing on the items found in the tunnel, states: "pottery shards ... and coins from the end of the Second Temple period, prior to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in ... 70 C.E., were discovered in the channel."

Archaeological digs at Qumran and surrounding settlements have revealed not an isolated, penurious community, but in some respects a rather flourishing one, which in the Second Temple period contained installations for blacksmithing and tanning and what seems to be an immense pottery factory. The residents there traded with other settlements, kept a stable, grew crops and raised sheep. Based on theories that the residents lived a communal lifestyle, some have termed it "the first kibbutz," complete with agriculture, light industry, a communal dining room and a common treasury - a cache of hundreds of silver coins was found on the site.

The participants in this discussion, all field archaeologists, are Joseph (Yossi) Patrich, associate professor of archaeology at the University of Haifa; Hanan Eshel, senior lecturer in archaeology at Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University; Yizhar Hirschfeld, lecturer of classical archaeology at Hebrew University; and Jodi Magness, associate professor of classical and Near Eastern archaeology at Tufts University. BAR editor Hershel Shanks moderates the discussion, which was held in Jerusalem last summer.

Find a graveyard, assume it's filled with Essenes, use that to prove the Essenes had a community, have lunch.

Grave robbers, who presumably saw the archaeologists looking around the area last year, had already plundered the site by the time the formal dig began. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford said the latest discovery challenges previous assumptions about the community and its cemetery of 1,178 graves. The dig's co-director, Israeli archaeologist Magen Broshi, was cautious in characterizing the coffin's occupant. "The only thing we can be certain of is that he was a very affluent man," he said.

Recent discussion on Orion interested me in the issue of Chinese characters in the Dead Sea Scrolls. My attention focused particularly on the two symbols that were first associated with Chinese: the symbol in the bottom right margin of 1QS column 7 and the symbol in the right margin of 1QS column 9, line 3. In 1990, Victor Mair cautiously compared and contrasted these two symbols with the Chinese character "ti"... Looking at John Trever's published photographs of 1QS, my impression was that these two symbols were elaborated paragraphos marks (perhaps even coronis marks), used to separate sense units. The use of the paragraphos and coronis in Greek manuscripts is introduced in Turner (1971).

With what hope of success would Josephus have perpetuated this fraud? He was writing journalism, not history; there would have been thousands of Jews and other locals who would have heard of his account and said, “Essenes? What on earth is he talking about?”

He would only have immediately discredited himself by trying to perpetuate a fraud a million people could have immediately unveiled.

Clearly there was a movement represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, started by a “teacher of righteousness”, who apparently objected to one of the Hasmonean Chief Priests, so I don’t see why it is inconsistent to say that a group founded perhaps by a renegade priest wrote the dead sea scrolls.

In his book "The Jewish War," Flavius Josephus describes the Essenes as an ascetic, mystical religious sect that lived in abstinence from worldly pleasures, including sex. The Essenes are commonly believed to have written the Dead Sea Scrolls...

...by some people, yeah.

The problem I see with this author/paper is that the accuracy of Josephus (in this case, about the existence of a bunch of cave-dwelling ascetics called the Essenes) doesn't have anything much to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which apparently were hidden just the one time and never gone back for, and includes the Copper Scroll, which describes the hiding places of various items of value, appears to be obviously stuff from the Temple. Given the dating of the scrolls themselves (info that wasn't available to the modern individual who cooked up the Essenes=scroll writers), it seems settled that the cache of scrolls came from the Herodian temple during the Roman War.

This equating Josephus' Essenes with the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls isn't in Josephus, and isn't even in the scrolls' text, but has a modern origin. One the one hand we have people who fanatically defend this identification, and on the other we have the author of the claims described in the topic message. Both proceed from the same false premise.

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